The Dosages

E. Vance. 1999. The name on the label wasn’t just a ghost; it was me. I was the evidence they had been hiding in plain sight.

I sat back on my heels in the silt, the empty amber bottle cold and light in my hand. I looked at the sea of plastic inside the lockbox, a graveyard of my own consciousness. Every bottle was a month stolen, a year suppressed, a memory chemically cauterized before it could form a scar.

The dosage listed was 400 milligrams. Twice a day.

I felt a phantom nausea roll through me, the same sick, dizzy weight I had lived with since the fourth grade. I remembered the 'winter flu' that wouldn't break. I remembered the way the hallway used to stretch and tilt when I tried to walk to the bathroom. I remembered my mother sitting on the edge of my bed, her face a mask of tragic devotion, as she handed me the small white paper cup.

*Drink it all, Eleanor. It’s for your nerves. It’s to keep the bad dreams away.*

It hadn't been a sickness. It had been a blackout.

I reached for another bottle, then a third. The dates marched through 1999, into 2000, into the years I had spent as a listless, compliant teenager. Harrison hadn't just been my brother; he had been my chemist. He had taken a ten-year-old girl who saw a murder and turned her into a laboratory for memory management.

Arthur had built the physical wall to hide Tommy Finch. Harrison had built the chemical wall to hide me.

I looked at the dosages again. At my current age, 400 milligrams was enough to induce a dissociative state. For a ten-year-old, it was toxic. It was a neurological assault. No wonder I couldn't remember the pageant. No wonder I couldn't remember the color of my own room before the renovation.

The 'anxiety' Harrison treated me for now was just the withdrawal of my own mind trying to fight back against the chains. Every time a memory flickered—the drip of snow on hardwood, the smell of copper—he simply increased the load.

I gripped the edge of the lockbox, my leather gloves creaking in the suffocating silence of the void. They hadn't just protected Arthur's career. They had sacrificed my brain, my health, and my sanity to do it. They had been slowly killing the sister they claimed to protect, one white pill at a time.

I thought of the legal petition Harrison was filing. The 'erratic behavior.' The 'textbook collapse.' It wasn't a diagnosis. it was a side effect of the poison they were still pumping into my system.

He hadn't just erased her memory. He had poisoned her.